Kerry Wins. By a lot.

I was pleasantly surprised by last night's debate and how substantive it turned out to be. (Here is the transcript.)

Others have objected to this format, since it's not really a "debate" per se. That's true, but I don't really have a problem with that. I want to hear the candidates explain where they stand. This format allowed for that, with enough give-and-take to ensure that they each would have to defend their positions and would not be able to make unchecked assertions. Jim Lehrer, to his credit, seemed more interested in clarifying the candidates' positions and their differences than in scoring the contest on points. That may be disappointing to high school debate teams, but it's probably good for the country.

John Kerry was impressive last night. He was clear and succinct and, yes, "presidential." George W. Bush had his moments, but he also too often seemed petulant or at sea. He often seemed to be stalling for time to run out the clock, unable to fill his allotted 90 seconds after having repeated, yet again, the same series of catch phrases.

So Kerry earned a win and Bush earned a loss. In a country that treats such matters responsibly, that ought to count for something in determining the outcome on Nov. 2.

Anyway, below are some of the notes I jotted down while watching last night's debate. I've fleshed them out with quotes from the transcript.

* "10 million people have registered to vote in Afghanistan," Bush says. He repeats this two more times, referring to it later as "a phenomenal statistic." Matt Yglesias has been over this repeatedly at Tapped — Afghanistan has fewer than 10 million eligible voters. Bush's beloved statistic appears to be evidence of massive election fraud.

* Bush: "The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." Well, OK, if by "brought to justice" you mean "fully pardoned without so much as a handslap or any serious follow-up on the extent of the very real damage the network has produced."

* Kerry: "I would not take my eye off of the goal, Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, he escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded. But we didn't use American forces, the best trained in the world, to go kill him. The president relied on Afghan warlords that he outsourced that job to. That's wrong." Yes. More of this, please.

* Bush: "… my opponent talks about inspectors. The facts are that he was systematically deceiving the inspectors." And he refers to "failed inspections." I don't get the logic here. The inspectors found that there were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons on mass destruction. Blix and ElBaradei got it right. Bush got it wrong. Who, then, really "failed"? The main deception involved here seems to have been self-deception.

* Kerry: "The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it. The president made the judgment to divert forces from under Gen. Tommy Franks from Afghanistan before the Congress even approved it, to begin to prepare to go to war in Iraq. And he rushed to war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace. Now that is not the judgment that a president of the United States ought to make. You don't take America to war unless you have a plan to win the peace." That's gonna leave a mark.

* Bush: "Of course we're after Saddam Hussein — I mean bin Laden." Doh!

* Of bin Laden, Bush says, "He's isolated." Yeah, you know: 2/3 of al-Qaida's territory is a no-fly zone; sanctions have destroyed his weapons capability; a decade of weekly bombing runs have him contained; an internationally enforced regime of forced inspections and disarmament have crippled his once-mighty forces. You know, "isolated."

* I have myself, more than once, said that the invasion of Iraq was the "wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place." I think it's a powerful statement, but more importantly I think it's a true statement. This phrase will be repeated six times over the course of the debate, yet despite this repetition it doesn't seem to lose any of its clarity or forcefulness. The odd thing about this is that it is President Bush who repeats the phrase each time. Viewers went away from last night's debate with this phrase echoing in their ears: "the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place."

* Kerry finishes a long list of problems that need addressing in terms of domestic security: First-responders; bridges/tunnels/transportation upgrades; port security; airline cargo; chemical and nuclear plants; the Nunn-Lugar program to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. Bush's response seems to me to be his first major gaffe: "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap …" I really don't think the president wants to get into a tax cuts vs. security tussle, or to suggest that his tax cuts are more important than adequately funding Nunn-Lugar.

* Bush says his administration has "tripled" funding for homeland security to $30 billion. I don't know what to make of this. Where and when does the baseline $10 billion come from? The Department of Homeland Security now includes things like the Coast Guard and the former INS. Have their budgets increased? Or is Bush now just including their budgets as "homeland security" funding?

* Bush also says he has spent $3.1 billion for "fire and police." What does this figure mean? It's surely not the COPS program, which he's eliminating for no apparent reason. (Update: I think I've found the source for this: DHS block grants for first responders are funded for about $3.1 billion.)

* Kerry: "We didn't need that tax cut. America needed to be safe." Yep, he noticed that too.

* Bush: "I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America. That's my job. I work with Director Mueller of the F.B.I. He comes into my office when I'm in Washington every morning talking about how to protect us." I love the "when I'm in Washington" qualification. Some days, protecting America is his job. Other days it's clearing brush or, you know, reading to Florida schoolchildren. (Cheap shot? No — they're still using a catastrophic failure as a badge of honor. That's a cheap shot.)

* Bush: "My opponent at one time said, well, get me elected, I'll have them out of there in six months." Did Kerry ever say such a thing? (Update: Nope. Kerry addresses this later, saying, "I didn't say I would bring troops out in six months. I said if we do the things that I've set out and we are successful we could begin to draw the troops down in six months." So was Bush deliberately misrepresenting what Kerry had said? Or did he just not understand what Kerry had said?)

* The "liberation of Iraq" sounds great, but when Lehrer asks the president for a more specific explanation of what this means — "What criteria would you use to determine when to start bringing U.S. troops home?" — the answer sounds much less inspiring:

"The best indication about when we can bring our troops home, which I really want to do — but I don't want to do so for the sake of bringing them home, I want to do so because we've achieved an objective — is to see the Iraqis perform, is to see the Iraqis step up and take responsibility. And so the answer to your question is when our generals on the ground and Ambassador Negroponte tells me that Iraq is ready to defend herself from these terrorists, that elections will have been held by then, that there's stability and that they're on their way to, you know, a nation of, that's free. That's when."

Contrast that with this from Kerry: "I'm not talking about leaving. I'm talking about winning."

* Bush on world leaders: "I know how these people think." Yeah. That shone through last week when we all saw how enthusiastically he was greeted at the U.N. Kerry's basic point about "respected in the world" is valid and vital, but I don't know how well it plays election-wise and he may have hit those notes a few too many times in the debate. But when Kerry hit those notes, he hit them convincingly. Bush didn't.

* More generally on the "international community" stuff, what I thought was most effective for Kerry was his talk about restoring America's leadership role in the world. It's a bit like Bush's 2000 line about restoring "honor and dignity" — Kerry doesn't have to come right out and say that Bush has been unable to provide such leadership, voters can see that for themselves.

* Kerry: "I've had one position, one consistent position: that Saddam Hussein was a threat, there was a right way to disarm him and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way." Bravo. That's simple enough that even a cable news anchor should be able to understand.

* Kerry: "A critical component of success in Iraq is being able to convince the Iraqis and the Arab world that the United States doesn't have long-term designs on it. As I understand it, we're building some 14 military bases there now. … I will make a flat statement. The United States has no long-term designs on staying in Iraq." Remarkably, and tellingly, Bush did not make a similar flat statement.

* Bush: "One of his campaign people alleged that Prime Minister Allawi was like a puppet." Wherever would someone get that idea?

* Bush's tangent on the International Criminal Court seemed oddly off-topic. I'm sure he's got polling numbers telling him this is a hot-button issue for those LaHaye-esque paranoids who worry about a loss of American sovereignty, but for most viewers this must have seemed a confusing and unnecessary sidetrack.

* What is an "Iranian MOO-lah"?

* Bush: "We signed an agreement with North Korea that my administration found out was not being honored by the North Koreans." Um, yeah, except it wasn't being honored by your administration, either. And we broke it first. The extent of the nitty gritty on North Korea in the debate was surprising. Kerry's mini-backgrounder was an impressively concise overview of the mistakes made and the challenges ahead:

With respect to North Korea, the real story: We had inspectors and television cameras in the nuclear reactor in North Korea. Secretary Bill Perry negotiated that under President Clinton. And we knew where the fuel rods were. And we knew the limits on their nuclear power. Colin Powell, our secretary of state, announced one day that we were going to continue the dialogue and work with the North Koreans. The president reversed him, publicly, while the president of South Korea was here. And the president of South Korea went back to South Korea bewildered and embarrassed because it went against his policy. And for two years, this administration didn't talk at all to North Korea. While they didn't talk at all, the fuel rods came out, the inspectors were kicked out, the television cameras were kicked out and today there are four to seven nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea.

That happened on this president's watch.

* Bush's response to the question about Kerry's "character" seemed overlong. Was this an attempt to play up the "candidate you'd most want to have a beer with" factor? Or was this an attempt to preempt what Kerry might say in the next 90 seconds? The forced civility was nice and all, if you set aside the nasty, gutter politics and whisper campaigns and Swift Boat BS lurking beneath the smiling face.

* Kerry didn't hesitate a second in responding to the question about the most serious threat to America's national security. His demeanor and conviction in responding to that question should go a long way to dispelling any of the well-funded, but not well-founded, "flip-flopper" accusations spread by the Bush campaign.

* Bush's final statement was a bit odd. It's not a good sign when a candidate has to use such a statement to reassure voters he's not going to draft their children ("we will reform our military — military will be an all-volunteer army …"). And the "mountaintop" bit — "We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace" — is overwritten dreck. Whatever happened to Michael Gerson?